


still standing (just barely)

by Liu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Inspired by The Walking Dead, M/M, Meta!Len, basically everybody apart from the two of them is dead, meta!Barry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-04 01:46:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5315621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liu/pseuds/Liu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry wakes up from his coma alone, in STAR Labs. There are dead bodies everywhere... and some of them are walking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	still standing (just barely)

**Author's Note:**

> Anon on tumblr asked for a zombie AU with coldflash... honestly I feel a little underqualified to provide, because of 'Rogue Z', which is a fic that struck a chord in my heart and basically dragged me towards coldflash full-force... but I tried XD the anon also asked for a side of weatheratom, and I'm sorry that I didn't provide that: but the story just took shape like this and it made sense this way...

Barry’s alone when he wakes up. He’s not in a hospital, that much is certain - it takes him a while to unplug all the tubes and wires from his skin and look around. He feels an immediate thrill of excitement when he realizes that he’s at S.T.A.R. Labs, a place he’s been dreaming of seeing from the inside for a long, long time.  
  
However, he never really imagined he’d get to drag himself down the curved corridor while trying not to stumble over bodies. His stomach turns at the smell - he struggles towards the entrance, still draped only in a hospital robe, ass bare and feet getting cold. He’s expecting fresh air, and instead, there’s a swarm of flies and a row upon row of more bodies, haphazardly covered with plastic sheets. He spots a tank behind the fence, but it’s deserted, just like the whole street.   
  
What the fuck happened?! He doesn’t know how long he’s been asleep - he remembers the lightning, but he’s got no idea why he was at S.T.A.R. Labs instead of a hospital, or why there’s so much death everywhere.

He understands it a little better when an inhuman groan sounds from behind him and he turns just in time to avoid a flailing, decomposing arm, attached to a guy who should be dead but instead, staggers towards Barry on unsteady, rotting feet.

Barry yelps and turns to run.

Everything becomes a blur and he ends up hitting the fence around the building. How the fuck did he cross the distance of fifty feet in under a second?!

He feels his hand start vibrating and his eyes widen at the strange sensation - but the groans and growls of a walking  _corpse_  are steadily approaching and Barry decides to wonder over all that unbelievable shit when there are no dead people chasing him.

Maybe they don’t want to hurt him - maybe it’s just some sort of a weird residual reflex that keeps them moving. Barry doesn’t feel confident enough to try and find out while his ass is still catching breeze of what looks like a mild autumn day. He turns and runs, as fast as he can.

…………

He must’ve run all around Central City in the next twenty-four hours. The heaps of decomposing bodies are everywhere, torn arms lining every street, milky-white eyes staring out of bashed-in skulls, intestines spilled out onto the pavements. Barry’s sick a couple of times, from the smell, from the sight, from worry about his family. There’s no one at Joe’s house, no one at the precinct, no one anywhere that Barry knows to look. He keeps searching, keeps straining his ears for the sound of human voices that actually form words instead of grunts and screams, for the sound of gunshots, he keeps watch for every movement out of the corner of his eye. It’s a fucking zombie, every time something stirs in his field of vision. Barry’s seen enough crazy apocalyptic movies to  _know_  a zombie when he sees one, but he would’ve never thought it would  _happen_ , for real. 

He’s getting slower and slower, and it scares him. He got a baseball bat, somewhere along the way, and hit the zombie that got too damn close. It kept moving even after its chest caved in and stomach ripped, splashing rotten guts all over Barry’s bare feet. The man - the zombie - kept straining for Barry, dragging his decomposed body closer, and Barry just ran, disgusted and terrified and thinking ‘can these things be killed in any way?!’. 

He found a shopping mall - overrun, but he was able to zip through the crowded, groan-filled halls and get to a deserted part of a clothing store. He found sneakers that fit him, jeans and a shirt and a hoodie, and he grabbed a backpack even though he had nothing to carry. He folded a couple of fresh shirts into it, because maybe, if nothing kills him, he would need clean clothes in a couple of days; the sweet, stomach turning smell of decomposing flesh permeates the air and Barry’s pretty sure his shirt is gonna smell like death in just minutes.

He tries to look for something to eat, his stomach churning with sickness but also with emptiness, but the food court at the mall is empty, the remnants of bread and tomatoes and ice-cream smudged all over the floor, under blood and gore and dead people. He finds a water bottle, but it’s half-empty and he’s afraid to drink something when he doesn’t know whether someone drank from it before: he’s got no idea how whatever killed (and reanimated) these people spreads. All the zombie films always talk about bites - but this is real life, and the possibility of this shit being airborne makes Barry sick to his stomach again. He races out of the mall and breathes fresh air, and then runs further, until he’s out of town, on a highway to Keystone. If it  _is_  airborne, he’s probably already caught it, and the thought terrifies him so much that his hands shake, not with speed, just with dread.

He drags himself down the road, but he can’t go too far. Cars are piled up along the highway, dead people shuffling everywhere, and Barry nearly whines. He can’t be the only one left… but after a day of looking, he’s starting to wonder if he really might be. 

Damn, he doesn’t even have the time to really think about why he can run so fast all of a sudden - he noticed abs when he was changing into a proper shirt, and  _those_  definitely weren’t on his stomach before, but there’s no one he can ask. He could go back to S.T.A.R. Labs, but all of their computers were smashed, so he wouldn’t likely find anything useful. 

He feels like the lowest of the low when he turns back towards the city and looks into the empty cars to try and find something to eat, something to use. There’s an intact protein bar and he munches on it while he chokes on tears, thinking of Joe and Iris. He tries telling himself that someone must’ve gotten out, that if there were tanks, there could’ve been helicopters bringing people to safety, that there has to be a camp  _somewhere_ , for people who aren’t rotting and growling… but when he tries to turn on the radio in one car, all he hears is static. He has to move on, eventually, when the noise attracts a few zombies, and he tries to run, but his speed comes in small bursts and leaves him weak and dizzy when he reaches the city again. 

It’s been thirty-one hours (he stole a watch from the mall, too, and he would feel bad if the smell of death wasn’t permanently lodged in his nose now). Thirty-one hours and he hasn’t seen anyone. Anyone living. Anyone talking. Barry feels his eyes go heavy. He needs sleep, but he’s terrified of trying to curl up behind a dumpster, when the ambient groaning of the dead is everywhere around. 

He climbs up the first fire escape he sees, finds an open window and steps inside, clutching on the baseball bat. Maybe he should’ve tried to find a gun - but he never learned how to shoot, so he would likely just annoy the zombies or attract more of them - they seem to come for loud noises, if the mall when he accidentally kicked over a chair or the car radio’s loud static are any indication. 

There’s a bed, disheveled and with dinosaur-printed sheets. A kid’s bed, too small, too narrow, and there’s a darkened, dried bloodstain smudging over a good half of the room. Barry squeezes his eyes shut and does his best not to imagine what had to happen there to leave marks like that. After a bit of hesitation, he drags a chest of drawers in front of the door out of the room, so that if anything tries to come in, he’ll have to hear it, and collapses into the bed. 

…………

He wakes up and his brain is all cotton, mouth dry and eyes scratchy. His stomach convulses, and Barry knows he has to look for food… he just has no idea where. A grocery store somewhere, maybe, find a few cans that should’ve survived until now. How long ago did this happen…? All of the zombies he saw were greyish-green, chunks of  _everything_  falling off. None of them looked… fresh, none of them looked like they were alive just a couple of days ago. Would the food be any good, even if he found the non-perishables? Would it even be _there_  or was it all taken by the people who ran away? (Barry has to cling to the hope that someone, anyone, made it out, that there is a place to look  _for._ )

He decides to look through the city again, but it’s harder when his feet won’t go as fast as he’s used to. He’s come to rely on his speed to avoid attacks, the baseball bat more of a reassurance in his grip than an actual weapon, and when his speed fails him the first time, he stumbles and scrapes his chin on the sticky, smelly asphalt of the road. Two zombies shuffle closer - it’s mostly a deserted alley, and Barry scrambles back to get a hold of his bat, even as adrenaline surges through his blood because he knows he’s in trouble. He tries to access that feeling of  _fast_ , but all it does is make his vision swim; he screams, but it comes out a quiet whine, and he knows it won’t help. The zombies are dragging closer - one of them has long, flowing hair that must’ve been beautiful when she was alive, but now half of her face is missing. The other zombie is a big guy, and Barry knows as he looks at him that the baseball bat won’t do a damn thing against that guy. He pushes himself back, hands and feet and jeans dragging over the road, and he knows he’s going to die when the woman lunges-

Barry closes his eyes and feels a blast of cold. Is that how they kill…? Nothing he knows about zombies talks about cold, but maybe that’s just the feeling of imminent death freezing him solid.

He opens his eyes again a couple of moments later, when the groaning stops, and he’s still not dead. The zombies are frozen solid, caught in huge chunks of ice up to their eyes, only the tops of their heads left free-

There’s a gunshot and the woman’s head explodes. The big man’s skull follows, and Barry can’t suppress the strangled gasp, the surge of heady excitement as he thinks that whoever is shooting has to be,  _has to be_ , human.

Silence… then footsteps. Retreating; Barry pushes himself up, vision swimming and legs unsteady.

“Wait!” he screams - it comes out hoarse and much quieter than he would’ve liked, but the footsteps stop echoing through the alley.

Barry staggers forward, around the frozen statues of headless zombies, slips in the puddle of brains, catches himself against the stinky wall. 

There’s a man. He’s standing at the mouth of the alley, hood covering his head, but he’s not swaying, his back is straight and his shoulders squared, arms resting by his sides, a gun dangling from the one hand Barry can see.

“Wait,” he repeats quietly and struggles to get closer; his vision is swimming worse with every second, the whole world rocking so much that he doesn’t even know if he’s dreaming the guy up, but no, someone  _had_  to shoot (and freeze?!) those zombies, someone  _saved_  him, someone human and alive, and Barry’s not letting him slip away. 

The guy waits, and Barry’s nearly close enough, but he slips again and his knee painfully hits the ground. He feels the world slipping away from him, stomach tight and head weirdly light - the last thing he notices are the cold, cold hands closing around his arms in a tight grip, and blue, living eyes.

……………

He wakes up on a sleeping bag, on a roof. The night sky is clear and full of stars, without any lights obscuring them from the streets. Barry startles as he notices movement out of the corner of his eye; it’s scary how quickly his brain abandoned hope of human life and just plain sends warning signals through Barry’s body when something is moving nearby.

It’s the guy from the alley. He’s older than Barry, greying hair curling wildly on his head, eyes calculating when he turns to look at him.

He walks closer, and Barry fights the instinct to scramble out of reach. He instinctively catches when the guy tosses a box towards him: it’s protein bars, and Barry hungrily tears into it even before the guy mutters “Eat.”

A dozen cranberry bars later, Barry’s stomach stops trying to digest itself, and he sighs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

The guy gives him a small smirk.

“Looks like you haven’t eaten in a while, kid.”

His voice is low and teasing, pleasantly human after days of only hearing grunts and growls. Barry finds himself smiling. 

“Sorry. I’m Barry.”

The guy stares at him, like he’s forgotten that he should introduce himself in turn, but in the end, he shrugs and offers his name back.

“Len.”

“What happened?” Barry asks, because no matter how much he’s enjoying human interaction, he wants to  _know_.

Len sighs and stretches out his legs - he’s sitting about four feet from Barry, not close enough and not far enough at the same time, his back against the brick wall. 

“I’d ask if you were new around here, but the thing is, we don’t get many new people ‘round these parts anymore,” Len sneers. “How come you’re alive?”

“ _You’re_  alive too,” Barry points out. The guy snorts.

“Been the only one for months, kid. How did you hide this long?”

Barry shrugs, and his stomach tightens again. Only one. His hopes of finding more groups of survivors vanish and leave an empty, gaping hole right in the middle of his heart. 

“Got hit by lightning, before Christmas. I woke up a couple of days ago, in S.T.A.R. Labs-”

Len’s eyes inexplicably narrow as he hears the name and he leans forward sharply:

“You one of the idiots who made this happen?!”

Barry squeaks and shakes his head immediately, even though he doesn’t quite know what  _this_  is.

“I don’t know why I was there! I got hit by lightning, that’s the last thing I remember - I don’t really know why I wasn’t in a hospital, but I think I must’ve been in a coma, or at least unconscious, I don’t remember anything from the past…”

He realizes he doesn’t know what date it is, and looks at Len helplessly. The man relaxes a little, leans back against the wall, and sighs.

“It’s September. I’d say you were lucky, but I’d be lying.”

Barry mulls it over for a moment. Nine months… he’s just lost nine months of his life, and woke up to a world gone to shit. He shivers and looks at Len again.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“The particle accelerator.”

“At S.T.A.R. Labs?” Barry blinks - he remembers how he wanted to see it get turned on, but he had work to do in his lab and he had to miss it. He was working on the samples from that crime scene, and he looked out of the window-

“It blew up,” Barry breathes out, and Len nods with a solemn frown.

“Yeah. Killed a few people, but overall, everybody thought it was nothing. Couple months later, people started getting powers.”

“Powers?” Barry yelps - in the face of all that death and destruction, he adapted to his speed quickly and never thought about it in terms of  _powers_ , but he guesses that’s what it is. Abnormal, supernatural… powers.

Len raises one hand in front of himself - it coats in thick, glimmering ice in the blink of an eye and Barry gasps. The ice dissolves in the next moment and it’s just Len’s arm again, fingers wiggling in the air.

“Crazy shit,” he shrugs. “Mind control and poison clouds, fire, ice, air, electricity, teleportation… anything you can imagine. Got easy to steal shit for a while,” Len smirks, and Barry gasps, because he suddenly recognizes his face, from Joe’s old files, photoalbums full of suspects and ex-cons. He doesn’t remember the name, just that Len is undoubtedly a criminal. Barry fights the urge to get upset about that: whoever the man was, it’s highly irrelevant in a world where everybody’s dead and still walking. Len continues, and if he noticed Barry’s reaction to his comment, he’s ignoring it.

“People started getting sick after a while. Everybody thought it was some virus, like bird flu - they got feverish, delirious… died after a couple of days. Took longer for some, but everyone died. Eventually they figured out it was all people who got in contact with one of the metas.”

“Metas?” Barry repeats - he feels stupid for only parroting back Len’s words, but he can’t help the curiosity, the dread. 

“Yeah,” Len nods. “That’s what they called them.  _Us_. Metahumans. They called for a hunt on all of us, said they had to put us down before more people got killed. That’s when the dead started coming back.”

Barry shivers just at the thought. Len’s eyes are staring to nowhere, no doubt focused on the terrible memories he’s dragging up by talking about it all. Barry wants to stop him, but he knows it won’t change anything, and he wants to know, with morbid fascination and gut-wrenching terror.

“There were dozens of them at first. Nobody knew how to fight them - lots of people got bit, scratched, killed. Everyone who died, they just kept coming back, attacking more people. The army arrived in April, started shooting in the streets, killed a couple living people, there were riots, panic, people tried to leave the city. Shit got out to Keystone, Starling, a few other cities. That’s when they built a wall, all around Central. Someone calculated the range of the explosion and they just built us all in. I heard they let humans come through, built a refugee camp behind the wall, did some testing, let people leave if the bloodwork turned out right. Then someone got powers on the outside, just days after being let out of Central…” Len laughs a little, shakes his head, and Barry feels like he’s listening to an intro to a post-apocalyptic survival game. It’s surreal, unbelievable, and he wishes he had the conviction and hope to accuse Len of lying, but he doesn’t. “They closed the gates. Didn’t let anyone else out. It’s all just been dead people in here, for months.”

Barry blinks - he can’t imagine that anyone would do this, just… shut out everyone human and helpless against the attacking corpses, let people die instead of helping.

“Didn’t you try to get out?” he asks, his throat closing at the implications swirling through his head, even though he’s trying not to think about it.

Len gives him a pointed look and shakes his head:

“Would’ve been shot.”

“They can’t just keep watch around the wall forever,” Barry sighs - there must be hope, some timeframe they can work with, but Len just shrugs and crushes all hope with a few words.

“Probably just waiting it out and then they’ll burn the city to the ground, with all the walking corpses - and us - still inside.”

“We have to get out!”  
  
Barry knows he sounds hysterical as he jumps up to his feet, but he doesn’t want to die - he doesn’t want to die  _here_ , he doesn’t want to give up on the thought that maybe,  _maybe_  Iris and Joe were among those who managed to get out before the gates were closed, among those in camps whose blood proved them human and they could find shelter away from all this madness. “I have to find my family! Don’t  _you_?!”

Len gives him a cold look and shakes his head.

“Found the last of mine today.”

Barry opens his mouth to protest that he doesn’t see anyone else here, when it clicks in his brain, the horrible truth of what Len’s saying, and he deflates a little, lets a shaky breath out as he runs a hand over his hair.

“You… the…”

“The two that attacked you,” Len shrugs. “Been trying to find them for months. She was my sister. He was my best friend.”

“I’m sorry,” Barry mutters. Len shakes off his sympathy with a wave of one long-fingered hand.

“Nah. I knew they were dead. Just didn’t want them wandering around, rotting on their feet.”

Barry wonders if he’ll ever be this cold, if he’ll ever have the time. 

“We have to get out,” he sighs and sits back down, arms curling around his knees. “We need to get to the wall, talk to people-”

“They’ll shoot on sight, kid,” Len growls, the first sign of any emotion being the irritation seeping into his voice. “Most of the crawlers are right by the wall, all the people who camped out there hoping the gates would open again. It’s hundreds,  _thousands_  of them. We won’t get anywhere close to the wall, and even if we did, the people outside wouldn’t just  _let_  us through.”

“They would!” Barry argues, “We’re alive, we can promise not to use our powers-”

His hands start vibrating from the exasperation and Len gives him a pointed sneer.

“ _Can_ you make that promise, kid? That you won’t accidentally start doing  _that_ ,” he waves his hand towards Barry, whose limbs are a blur he can’t stop, “and accidentally touch someone? That you won’t make someone die in pain and then come back as a monster just because you’re out of control?”

Barry’s eyes sting with the tears he’s trying to push back, and he draws a shaky breath to suppress the sobs lodged in his chest like a painful shard of glass, grating against his heart. It was enough to think, to  _see_ , that everyone around him was dead. To think that he could find Iris and Joe again and hug them and just slip out of control, and they would  _die_  just days later, because of him… to think that he could easily cause a similar epidemic in another city, the blackening, rotting blood of thousands of people on his hands… He presses the heels of his still vibrating palms into his eyes and tightens his jaw, determined not to cry, even though there’s not much else left to do.

“Why are you still here?” he asks in the end, quiet and not quite accusing, but he can’t wrap his head around it. What is Len doing here, except hunting down the walking corpses of people he once loved?

The only response is a shrug, for a while. When Len speaks again, his voice is rough, as if Barry isn’t the only one swallowing his fears and pains so much that they scratch his throat raw.

“I was responsible for a few of those deaths. Every time I see a crawler, I wonder if I iced them, back when I first got my powers, if they got bit by someone I iced before. So I stay and kill as many as I can. Not much else to do, anyway.”

They sit in silence for a long time, both staring into distance that’s crawler-free even if they can hear the groans rising up from the streets like the smell of sewers on a hot summer day.

“We’re getting out of here,” Barry says in the end. Len opens his mouth, and Barry stares at him, determination creasing his forehead and making his fists clench until they shake at a completely human rate. “We’re going to kill as many as we can. All of them, if we can. And then we’re getting out of here. Somewhere safe, and remote, where we won’t be a threat to anyone else.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Len smirks - Barry can see in his eyes that he’s just humoring him, that he thinks they’ll get killed long before they’ll find a way out of a walled-in city… but the least they can do is try. 

The least Barry can do is see if he recognizes Iris’ jacket on any of the corpses - if he sees Joe in any of the thousands of pairs of milky, unfocused eyes.

……………

Winter comes and goes, snowless as usual in Central but no less freezing for it. Len doesn’t get cold, but Barry does; he huddles in abandoned apartments under blankets that no longer smell like other people. Len follows, even if he keeps frowning and sitting by the window every damn time. 

……………

“Quiet,” Len hisses into his ear, his cool body pressing Barry into a wall as the planes fly low over the city. Barry wants to wave his arms, call out, ask for help, but he knows by now that the planes aren’t here to look for survivors. He drags Len down to another abandoned bed that night, and they fall asleep with limbs tangling together to the sound of bombs going off in the distance.

“We have to go,” Len mutters into Barry’s matted hair in the morning. He stopped making fun of Barry’s idea about leaving just a couple of weeks ago, around the New Year’s they celebrated by sharing stupid stories from their past that still had real, living people in them. Barry thinks it had to do with him phasing through a wall by accident - and suddenly, the thought of getting through a wall that has no doors and all the machine guns protecting it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

………………

“We could’ve picked a warmer place,” Barry complains as he drags the chopped wood inside to let the fire get stronger.

Len laughs, even though he’s heard that hundreds, thousands of times.

“We’ve been over this, kid. It was a desert or this, and I refuse to ride camels and brush sand out of my food.”

Barry laughs as he stokes the fire, and thinks back to the fireplace at Joe’s house. The thought doesn’t hurt so much, after all these years; he chose not to contact anyone once they got out, for fear of being discovered and put down like the threats they are, and also for fear of finding out that Iris and Joe didn’t make it. He chooses to believe they’re safe and happy somewhere. Iris might be married by now, and Barry has to glance over his shoulder at Len, who is whittling away at a piece of wood with his knife - a pastime he’s taken up in the past year and he’s getting scarily good - but the thought of Iris with someone else doesn’t hurt as much as it would, a couple of years ago. Barry believes she’s happy, and it helps getting him through the nights when he wakes up and remembers it all. 

Len always grunts into his pillow and drags him back to bed, one cool arm curled around Barry’s waist, and the weight of it makes his sleep blissfully dreamless for the rest of the night, even though he always has to pee at five in the morning if Len’s not careful and ices his stomach in their sleep.

Barry doesn’t mind. They’re not hurting anyone else - they’re not a threat, and they’re alive. That’s all that matters, all that Barry will allow himself to focus on. They’re alive, and not alone; they don’t look back to things they can’t have anymore. There’s no TV in their shack, no radio, no newspapers, no computers. Every year, Barry risks running all the way to the nearest town, dozens, if not hundreds, of miles away, and sneaks into bookstores at night, unabashedly stealing home improvement volumes that help them keep their cabin running, detective novels Len always laughs about, random things that look interesting. Len must be rubbing off on him, because he hardly ever feels bad about stealing anymore, books or food or those tight thermal sweaters Len wears, mostly so that he doesn’t radiate cold inside of the cabin - the small stove has enough trouble heating up the space, however crowded and tiny.

It’s not a life Barry would’ve ever imagined for himself, all those years back when he was watching the particle accelerator blow up from his lab… but it’s a life.

And neither of them has to go through it alone.  

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my [tumblr.](http://pheuthe.tumblr.com/)


End file.
